The Influence of José da Silva Lisboa’s Journalism on the Independence of Brazil (1821-1822)

By Guilherme Celestino

This work analyses the impact of the publications written by the economist, jurist, administrator and historian José da Silva Lisboa, the future Viscount of Cairu, from 1821 to 1822, on the events that led to the Independence of Brazil in 1822. It reassesses the many interpretations of his role throughout the period, repositioning him among those who are part of the broad reformist Catholic Enlightenment. Although a supporter of Brazilian autonomy, a fierce critic of the Cortes of Lisbon and an important figure in the events that unfolded after the departure of Dom João VI from Rio de Janeiro in 1821, he would not openly embrace the Independence from the United Kingdom with Portugal and would instead work towards a solution that would encompass Brazil’s autonomy within a Portuguese Empire, which did not take place.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781839985096

Book preview

JOSÉ DA SILVA LISBOA AND THE BRAZILIAN INDEPENDENCE REVISITED: INTRODUCTION AND ARGUMENT

This book examines the publications written between 1821 and 1822 by the economist, jurist, public administrator and historian José da Silva Lisboa (1756–1835), subsequently named Baron and Viscount of Cairu, and his assessment of the significance of the events leading to the Independence of Brazil in 1822. Generally neglected by the research of this period, Silva Lisboa was one of the main Brazilian commentators on political events from the signing of the Bases of the Constitution by Dom João VI (1767–1826) and the King’s return to Portugal in 1821, as a consequence of the Liberal Revolution of 1820, until the early years of the Regency (1831–1840). He was a supporter of Brazilian autonomy during the period of The General and Extraordinary Cortes of the Portuguese Nation (1820–1822), or Cortes of Lisbon, and an important figure in the events that led to Independence, even if he did not fully embrace it.

In this book, I combine a literature review with the study of archival documentation to produce an account of Silva Lisboa’s early career as a journalist and a new interpretation of his role in the independence process. To do so, I also bring to this project an overview of the impact of his thirteen publications on the work of other editors and, conversely, the impact of their publications on those of Silva Lisboa. The interpretation of these documents will bring to light the range of his ideas and how they can be related to concepts such as the Enlightenment, conservatism, liberalism, recolonization and despotism.

The work of Silva Lisboa as a journalist has always been seen by scholars of the twentieth century as sycophantic and reactionary, with his publications being revisited only recently in the context of a reformist Enlightenment; it is important to consolidate this interpretation further by analysing through the study of political philosophy his writings during Independence and by reassessing the many interpretations of the Enlightenment and of liberalism in this period. Silva Lisboa’s contradictions are well documented. On the one hand, he was a ‘letrado’ (an intellectual) and introduced studies of political economy into the Luso-Brazilian world, being one of the responsible for the liberal decree opening up trade in the American possession to all friendly nations in January 1808, after the transfer of the Portuguese Royal Family to Rio de Janeiro, which ended Brazil’s colonial history. On the other hand, he was part of the Portuguese administrative establishment; a supporter of an undivided United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarve under the house of Braganza, and a fierce critic of the excesses of the French Revolution and the Luso-Brazilian radical liberals who were intent on pushing for more reforms.

Nevertheless, although a central actor in this period, Silva Lisboa’s role in the independence process was overshadowed by the controversies in which he took part and the disputes in the press against his opponents. His bold rhetoric influenced the flow of events and I locate him among those who fought for Brazilian autonomy both by criticizing the decisions in Lisbon regarding the ex-colony and by trying to maintain the administrative structure brought by the Braganzas after they fled from Napoleon.

There was, nevertheless, a shadow cast over him by his contemporaries due to his anachronistic opposition to a complete break with Portugal at a moment when the Brazilian establishment decided to summon a new Brazilian Assembly (1822–1823) independent of that of Lisbon, which is where this book ends. This led to a series of controversies Silva Lisboa became involved in with the press on the eve of the Independence, which are discussed in the third and fourth chapters. Documents found in my archival research and that, to my knowledge, are unpublished to date corroborate with the hypothesis that Silva Lisboa’s decision to contradict public opinion and oppose the summoning of a new Assembly profoundly affected his image, his personal life and his work as a journalist. He decided to avoid taking part in any debate regarding the calling of the Brazilian Assembly after July 1822, only reinforcing his own defence in a pamphlet of August 1822, written after he was prevented from voting for the Assembly.

Interpreting Silva Lisboa through His Publications

There are, perhaps, in the end only two ways in which a historian may undertake the study of a document in the history of political thought. One may consider it as a text, supposed to have been intended by its author and understood by its reader with the maximum coherence and unity possible; the historian’s aim now becomes the reconstitution of the fullest possible interpretation available to intelligent readers at the relevant time. Alternatively, one may consider it as a tissue of statements, organized by its writer into a single document, but accessible and intelligible whether or not they have been harmonized into a single structure of meaning. The historian’s aim is now the recovery of these statements, the establishment of the patterns of speech and thought forming the various contexts in which they become intelligible, and the pursuit of any changes in the normal employment of these patterns which may have occurred in consequence of the statements being made.¹

To interpret the history of political thought, academics that study this period have omitted conservative journalistic publications under the pretext that this political viewpoint was not part of the canon. The focus on the work of Silva Lisboa is due to the complexity of his character and the difficulty of, as Pocock says, establishing ‘the patterns of speech and thought forming the various contexts in which they become intelligible’.² I gathered all the ‘tissues of statements’ organized by Silva Lisboa not in a single document, but in thirteen newspapers and pamphlets he published from 1821 to 1822, to understand his role and aspirations in a complex period when Brazil was not yet a nation, but was obliged to quickly become independent, without previously presenting all the conditions required for this.

This is one of the reasons why such a champion of Brazilian autonomy as Silva Lisboa was so reluctant to abandon his support for the ‘Reino Unido’ (United Kingdom) with Portugal and fully embrace independence. He was suspicious of the capacity of a self-centred slave-owning Brazilian elite to rule such a socially complex country. But this led to a problem, which was the creation of two interpretations of his image. It is important to dispel some of the myths that served as sustenance for both these interpretations. The more traditional interpretation is that he was a sort of Brazilian ‘founding father’ or a ‘Brazilian Adam Smith’³ or even a ‘disciple of Edmund Burke’,⁴ in accordance with that conservative current of thought which only favours uncritical histories of the ‘great figures’, such as A Abertura dos Portos: Cairu, os Ingleses, a Independência (1961), by Wanderley Pinho, or Visconde de Cairu: Vida e Obra (2000), by Elysio de Oliveira Belchior. This vision was revisited in texts such as ‘A Brazilian Adam Smith: Cairu as the Founding Father of Political Economy in Brazil at the Beginning of the 19th Century’ (2018) by Paulo Roberto de Almeida and Visconde de Cairu: Um Teórico Liberal do Início do Século XIX no Brasil (2013) by Itamar da Silveira and Suelem de Carvalho, which appeared in the wake of the reactionary revival in Brazil backed by Neoliberal think-tanks. The latter inaccurately presented the civil servant Silva Lisboa as the first to advocate an unregulated economy in Brazil, a view mainly based on his professed admiration for British Liberalism and his role in the opening of Brazilian ports to friendly nations in 1808 which, although a liberal measure, was also necessary to put an end to the position of Brazil as a colony.⁵

This view contrasts with the one espoused by the main Brazilian scholars of the twentieth century in pivotal works dedicated to understanding Brazil’s history, culture and society. The Marxist and nationalist historian Nelson Werneck Sodré, one of the chief intellectuals of the previous century in Brazil, took a critical view of Silva Lisboa in his seminal work História da Imprensa no Brasil (1966) which will be discussed throughout this text. Here, he is accompanied by two other great figures, Antonio Candido and Sérgio Buarque de Holanda. In Raízes do Brasil (1936), Buarque de Holanda pursues his criticisms of Silva Lisboa’s Estudos do Bem Comum and considers his perspective to be ‘anti-modern’:

É semelhante empenho que se espelha, com perfeita nitidez, em suas opiniões filosóficas, em suas genuflexões constantes diante do Poder e, sobretudo, em sua noção bem característica da sociedade civil e política, considerada uma espécie de prolongamento ou ampliação da comunidade doméstica, noção essa que se exprime, com a insistência de um leitmotiv, ao longo de toda a sua obra.⁶

[It is a similar effort that is mirrored, with perfect clarity, in his philosophical opinions, in his constant genuflections before Power and, above all, in the very notion of civil and political society, considered to be a kind of extension or expansion of the domestic community, a notion that expresses itself, with the insistency of a leitmotiv, throughout his work.]

Candido follows a similar path in Formação da Literatura Brasileira (1959). He only dedicates a few sentences to Silva Lisboa within the chapter ‘A promoção das luzes’, where he considers Cairu’s work to be of minor interest ‘pelo que poderia interessar ao nosso desígnio, – isto é, quanto ao pensamento social e sua expressão’ (for what might interest our purpose, – that is, in regard to social thought and its expression).⁷ This is understandable, because Silva Lisboa’s books are mostly dedicated to the study of political economy, but Candido does not take into account his work as a journalist. This is particularly remarkable, especially because his fellow journalist and ‘coimbrão’ Hipólito da Costa (1774–1823) is accorded greater prominence in Candido’s work, although, like Silva Lisboa, he was ‘muito identificado aos pontos de vista britânicos’ (much identified with British interests).⁸ This seems to be an ideological choice, because Hipólito da Costa is portrayed as a cosmopolitan liberal modernizer and founder of the Brazilian Press, especially by these academics from the University of São Paulo. Hipólito da Costa is depicted by Candido as someone who is very critical of the gratitude expressed by other Brazilians for the improvements brought to Rio de Janeiro by the Braganza government and was driven by the desire to ‘apontar as insuficiências numa crítica construtiva: e não louvar, e aceitar como dádiva’ (point out the limitations through constructive criticism: and not praise or accept it as a gift),⁹ a claim that is not entirely true. At the same time, in order to criticize Silva Lisboa, Candido cites none other than Hipólito da Costa, for whom Cairu, for all his talent, was an example of uncritical flattery, whose discourse was used as a tool to prevent Brazilians properly understanding their nation’s problems:

Nas Observações sobre o Comércio Franco do Brasil, o futuro Visconde de Cairu ia ao ponto de condenar a crítica aos atos do governo. Da sua tribuna, Hipólito saúda o aparecimento desta ‘primeira obra impressa do Brasil (já no Brasil se imprime!)’, mas aproveita para definir a missão da inteligência livre: ‘O estar eu habituado a ver em Inglaterra discutir publicamente as medidas do Governo, e conhecendo os bens que daí resultam à Nação, me faz receber de muito mau grado este princípio, que aqui se insinua, de extrema submissão às opiniões do Governo.’¹⁰

[In Observações sobre o Comércio Franco do Brasil, the future Viscount of Cairu went so far as to condemn criticism of the government’s actions. From his tribune, Hipólito welcomes the appearance of this ‘first publication in Brazil (printing is now possible in Brazil!)’, but takes the opportunity to define the goal of free-thinking: ‘The fact that I’m used to seeing in England measures of the Government being publicly discussed, and knowing the benefits of it for the Nation, it makes me very reluctant to accept this principle, which is implied here, of extreme submission to the Government’s opinions.’]

In other words, Candido took a one-dimensional view of both authors, seeing only qualities in Hipólito da Costa, and in Silva Lisboa, only flaws. Isabel Lustosa, in Cairu, panfletário: contra a facção gálica em defesa do trono e do altar (1999), also presents a mostly negative view of Silva Lisboa, repeating some of the criticisms directed against him by Candido and Buarque de Holanda. In this booklet, she compares his ‘cinismo’ (cynicism) to those of a modern politician and calls him a reactionary and leader of the ‘carcundática’¹¹ pro-monarchy faction in the press: ‘Sempre que havia radicalização, a Coroa apelava para a pena de seu mais fiel vassalo’ (Faced with radicalization, the Crown always appealed to the writings of its most faithful vassal).¹² This may be due to something that Christian Lynch has identified in the context of Iberian American academic thinking, in his essay ‘Conservadorismo Caleidoscópico: Edmund Burke e o Pensamento Político Do Brasil Oitocentista’ (2017): that is, the association of ‘conservatism’ with strongly negative characteristics:

O conservador é geralmente visto como alguém aferrado a uma visão hierárquica do mundo, defensora de privilégios, que vê com maus olhos a democratização, o reconhecimento dos direitos das minorias etc. Uma das explicações possíveis dessa conotação encontra-se no legado da tradição marxista, para a qual o conservadorismo era a ideologia das classes dominantes, ou seja, do establishment sociopolítico antipopular.¹³

[Conservatives are generally seen as holding on to a hierarchical view of the world, defending privileges, looking down on democratization, the recognition of minority rights, and so on. One of the possible explanations for this can be found in the legacy of the Marxist tradition, for which conservatism was the ideology of the ruling classes, that is, the anti-popular socio-political establishment.]

Pedro Meira Monteiro in his book Um Moralista nos Trópicos: O Visconde de Cairu e o Duque de la Rochefoucauld follows the same path by comparing the Brazilian intellectual with his seventeenth-century predecessor, the moralist author François de La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680). The focus of this interesting essay is on the civic catechisms written by Silva Lisboa in the early nineteenth century to guide the public sphere in what he believed was a good way of reinforcing moral values in this nation in the making. It is a conceptual history, not an intellectual one and although acknowledging the anti-Jesuitism in the work of Cairu, Meira Monteiro also says that it is important to recognize that he was ‘um soldado da Cruz’ (a soldier of the cross) who made use of symbolic elements to compare the ‘Império da Cristandade e o Império que nasceria’ (Empire of Christendom and the Empire that would be born), the Brazilian Empire, ‘sobre as ruínas de um mundo desfeito’ (over the ruins of a broken world), and the end of the Old Regime.¹⁴

Another reason why many works concerning Silva Lisboa were given a lower status in the late twentieth century is what Emilia Viotti da Costa, in The Brazilian Empire: Myths and Histories (2000), calls a ‘shift in historical studies’, in which ‘political and institutional histories have lagged as young scholars have turned their attention to the study of economic and social history’. She criticizes this shift because it gives a ‘fragmented picture of the society’ and forgets that there are many ‘interconnections among economic, social, political, and ideological institutions and structures’:¹⁵

More importantly, they make us forget that in modern societies, even more than in the past, politics is at the centre of human life. This centrality of politics is a result of both the incorporation of an increasing number of people into the market economy and the overwhelming presence of the modern state in the lives of people. As a consequence of these two processes, which are intimately related, political decisions have come to affect economic and social life in ways never seen before. […] It is impossible to understand the history of the powerless without understanding the history of the powerful. (And, of course, the reverse is also true). History from the bottom up can be as meaningless as history from the top down. What I am proposing here is not to re-establish an old-fashioned, elitist political and institutional history, but to conceive one in which politics (although keeping its relative autonomy, since one cannot reduce politics to a mere epiphenomenon) is seen in connection with other aspects of human life.¹⁶

That is, to critically reassesses the ‘history of the powerful’ and reconnects politics ‘with other aspects of human life’, such as journalism and literature, as is the case here too. The historian Theresa Kirschner also did so in the most detailed academic biography of Cairu to date, José da Silva Lisboa, Visconde de Cairu: Itinerários de um Ilustrado Luso-Brasileiro (2009), in which she presents a more balanced approach to his thinking in some of his writings.

Another aim was to review Benedict Anderson’s concept of the ‘imagined community’ and his claim, set out in his famous work Imagined Communities (1983), that independence in Latin America was the result of a liberal press spreading the idea of the Enlightenment. Anderson bases this approach on the notion that, in the American states (Brazil, the USA and former Spanish colonies), both metropolis and colony shared a common descent and language, and these were therefore not at stake for national liberation; instead, it was new economic and political ideas, the printing press and local administration that made the key contributions to the creation of a local national identity.¹⁷ He also argues that the French and American revolutions exerted a powerful republican influence on the newly independent communities, except in Brazil where the immigration of the Portuguese Dynasty in 1808, escaping from the Napoleonic invasion of the Iberian Peninsula, led to the coronation of King Dom João’s son as Pedro I of Brazil.¹⁸

I tend to agree with Marco Morel who, in his essay ‘Os primeiros passos da palavra imprensa’ in História da Imprensa no Brasil (2013), is critical of the recurrent belief that it was the transatlantic influence of new ideas through books and other printed media that caused or accelerated independence in the Americas. He believes that this argument should be treated with caution since there is no linear, evolutionary path connecting the new European Enlightenment ideas and the impulse towards independence in the Americas. First, because the concept of the Enlightenment is diffuse and dates from the early eighteenth century, via the French Revolution and up to the liberalism of the early nineteenth century. Second, because to accept such a premise, political groups and intellectuals of the American world would need to be homogenous and coherent and to receive the Enlightenment uniformly. There was no univocal or nearly immediate, uninterrupted relationship between the Enlightenment, the native elites and independence. In reality, the Enlightenment literature could be interpreted in a variety of ways which did not necessarily legitimize independence.¹⁹

Catholic Enlightenment and Independence

Silva Lisboa’s ideas should be reinterpreted bearing in mind not only recent appraisal of his historical figure, but also the most recent literature regarding the Catholic Enlightenment, repositioning him within this Reformist tendency. He positioned himself on different occasions against the continuity of slavery, supporting a gradual abolition and the immigration of Europeans to replace this workforce by offering them lands; the integration of Brazil’s economy in the world market following the treaties of 1808 and 1810 with England, firstly through agriculture, but evolving towards an industrial economy through the support of individual enterprises; the adoption of a constitutional monarchy with separation of powers and due-law procedures, and the shaping of public opinion by intellectual elites through literary societies and a responsible, and moderate, press.

Gabriel Paquette argues that Silva Lisboa’s reformist Enlightened ideas assumed that Brazil would not be fully independent without educating its citizens and extirpating ‘barbarism’,²⁰ that is why Cairu should be considered a paradigmatic advocate of an independence that was not inevitable. Making the case for Brazil’s full autonomy within a Luso-Brazilian empire, but not its independence, his writings illustrate the disputes among exogenous and local forces within Brazilian’s elite to control the outcome and determine the terms of this rupture, not only reinterpreting concepts such as liberalism, constitutionalism and republic, but also forging new ones such as recolonization.

Although it can be seen as an oxymoron,²¹ the Catholic Enlightenment is, in fact, according to Ulrich L. Lehner, a ‘heuristic concept that describes the diverse phenomenon that mainly took hold of Catholic intellectuals in the 18th century and early 19th century’ by combining a ‘multitude of different strands of thought and a variety of projects that attempted to renew and reform Catholicism in the 18th century’.²² The concept was coined by the German priest Sebastian Merkle in 1908, and it was only after the 1970s that it became widespread,²³ but most of the literature prefers to focus on the Catholic German states and the Holy Roman Empire in the late eighteenth century.

There are some controversies surrounding the use of the term. Until recently, according to Ritchie Robertson, ‘many historians denied that such a phenomenon existed’ or, following Peter Gay’s idea of ‘the rise of modern paganism’, they could not see a compromise between the intellectual movement and the Church; they identified ‘the Enlightenment principally with the Paris philosophes and took materialism and atheism to be its central tenets’.²⁴ Kirschner recalls that, as with Gay or Ernest Cassirer, there was a tendency to construct a homogenizing representation of the Enlightenment that fabricated a dichotomy between them and the defenders of Christianity, who came to represent the anti-Enlightenment, and the result was an oversimplification of a complex web of ideas.²⁵ These interpretations were challenged through the twentieth century by authors such as Albert Monod, Robert Palmer, Franco Venturi, Roland Mortier, Robert Chartier and Robert Darnton, who all disputed the representations of the eighteenth century as something monolithic and antichristian with a focus on France as its diffusing centre.²⁶

Other authors such as David Sorkin include Reformist Catholicism in a broader reformist movement as one among many forms of religious Enlightenment, including Protestantism. He argues that although the Enlightenment is always seen as the ‘stage in the development of a secular or modern culture inherently inimical to or at least distinct from religion’, in fact there was a ‘complementary form’ of Enlightenment which had a religious aspect in which representatives from different established religions, including lay believers and clergy, saw in this ‘new science and philosophy of the Enlightenment’ a tool to ‘renew and rearticulate their faith as well as to serve the cause of a common morality and domestic tranquillity’. In the specific case of the Catholic Enlightenment, Sorkin argues that it can be interpreted as a compromise between ‘baroque piety and Jesuitism at one end and a highly charged reform movement like Jansenism on the other’.²⁷

The Jesuits were, nevertheless, considered to be a symbol of the intolerance of the Counter-Reformation and a central character in many conspiracy theories regarding the religious order, including some that were echoed by Silva Lisboa in his publications, analysed here. Anti-Jesuitism was widespread among the ‘Enlightenments’ in Catholic countries. In Portugal, the policies to expel the order and reform the education system previously controlled by them were implemented in the second half of the eighteenth century by Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, the Marquis of Pombal (1699–1782). Pombal is considered to be the organizer of the ‘academic movement, stimulated during the reign of King João V (1705–1750), notably through the foundation of the Academia Real de História (Royal Academy of History)’.²⁸ It was a movement that encouraged new thinking among Portuguese intellectuals, including those living abroad in ‘cities like Rome, Paris, London and Amsterdam, where they could maintain closer contact with the new ideas without running any major risk of persecution by the civil and ecclesiastical authorities.’²⁹ Among these intellectuals was the priest Luis Antonio Verney (1713–1792) who became a symbol of the Enlightenment in Portugal and whose ideas influenced the education reforms made by Pombal with the objective of ‘assegurar uma formação ilustrada para futuros funcionários régios’ (ensure an enlightened training for future royal officials).³⁰

Other works put into perspective the heterogeneity of these Portuguese intellectuals, especially after the French Revolution. One example is Maria Ivone Ornellas de Andrade’s study of José Agostinho de Macedo (1761–1831), a priest and contemporary of Silva Lisboa whom she classifies as a paradoxical figure of the Enlightenment since he was a ‘leitor da produção filosófica iluminista’ (reader of the Enlightenment philosophical production) who used this knowledge – ‘to go against the Enlightenment itself’ against the Enlightenment itself, so becoming an ‘anti-iluminista’ (anti-enlightened).³¹

This was not the case of Silva Lisboa, who adopted the prevailing moderate current of political thought, embracing the reading of Montesquieu, Edmund Burke, Benjamin Constant and Jeremy Bentham. Although a Catholic who defended the ‘supremacia da Revelação sobre a razão’ (supremacy of Revelation over reason), Silva Lisboa would support the reconciliation of the Church with scientific progress and freedom of religion by articulating ‘o entusiasmo com as contribuições da filosofia natural para o progresso da sociedade, a defesa da educação como meio de desenvolvimento moral e da economia política como ciência propulsora da civilização’ (the enthusiasm for the contributions of natural philosophy to the progress of society, the defence of education as a means of moral development and political economy as the driving science of civilization).³²

This moderate liberalism, often labelled as conservatism, reflects on Silva Lisboa’s role during Independence and how this moment was understood. Most interpretations of Independence, as argued by Kenneth Maxwell, are ‘strongly influenced by dependency theory’, which ‘tended to homogenize the Latin American experience into a worldwide explanatory model’.³³ This analysis ‘discouraged an investigation of the process, causes, and dynamics of change, and it gave short shrift to institutional innovations or ideas’,³⁴ focusing mostly on socioeconomic aspects like the ‘shift from mercantile to industrial capitalism in Europe, and the consequent changes this provoked in the international economic system’, a vision shared by Marxist historians who explained it as a ‘shift from formal to informal imperialism.’³⁵ It is important to challenge this view, and the difficulty of labelling Silva Lisboa as for or against Independence is a good example of the complexity of the Brazilian movement.

As Boris Fausto argues, Brazil did not achieve its Independence through a revolutionary outbreak ‘but from a process which occasioned a few changes from and much continuity with the colonial period’, which began with the transfer of the Royal Family and the opening of the Ports.³⁶ There were some rebellions against the Portuguese Crown before independence, but, according to Viotti da Costa, they had a ‘regional character and failed to develop a national goal’. Later, Brazilian representatives to the Cortes of Lisbon ‘still made the point of presenting themselves as delegates from their provinces’, not Brazil.³⁷ This nurtured the fear among the leaders of the 1822 movement that the lack of unity would result in the secession of Brazil as had happened in Spanish America, and the Portuguese played upon this fact to push their agenda of recolonizing Brazil.³⁸ The lack of a unified national identity was compensated for by an anti-Portuguese feeling that had emerged at the end of the eighteenth century, with a rising ‘hostility against the mother country’ through its people, the Portuguese.³⁹

Another issue regarding Independence was a prevalent fear among the elite of the revolutionary mobs. A recent example had been the 1817 revolt in Pernambuco, which began as a movement of planters critical of the ‘lower return from their sugar and cotton exports and higher slave prices’,⁴⁰ but the enthusiasm of the masses who supported the movement, and who also comprised blacks and mulattoes, ‘scandalized members of the elite who had not been carried away by revolutionary ideas’.⁴¹ With the elite recalling the dangers of ‘haitianismo’, a reference to the Haitian Revolution, all ‘political movements deliberately appealing to the gente de cor by harping on their grievances, would haunt the ruling circles in independent Brazil until the middle of the nineteenth century.’⁴²

As Barman argues, the fact that the notables of Pernambuco, as a ‘matter of both habit and calculated self-interest’, ended up preferring ‘a condition of dependence to the risk of political innovation’,⁴³ can be credited not only to the Haitian Revolution but also to the outcome of the French Revolution and the reign of Terror (1793–1794).⁴⁴ The success of a political independence relied on the ability to ‘attract support across the social spectrum – notables, intellectuals, functionaries, and small folk’ but these examples showed the impracticality of achieving it without ‘social and racial disruption’.⁴⁵

Moreover, as Thomas Skidmore argues, it is important to take into account other aspects like the popularity of Dom João among Brazilians. ‘By raising the Estado do Brasil to the status of equal partner in a newly created United Kingdom in 1815, he legitimized his continued residence outside Portugal while also giving Brazilians new grounds for pride.’⁴⁶ If there were some ‘disaffection from the Portuguese regime’ as Leslie Bethell claims, the demand for political change was neither strong nor widespread. In the end, it was an external factor, the Porto Revolution of 1820, which precipitated the independence of Brazil.⁴⁷

Maxwell maintains that more than anything, what ‘was really at stake in 1822 was a question of monarchy, stability, continuity, and territorial integrity’.⁴⁸ After all, he goes on, Brazil was already ‘economically and politically emancipated between 1808 and 1820 while acting as the centre of the Luso-Brazilian Empire’, leading him to argue that ‘in 1820 it was Portugal that declared independence from Brazil, and only afterward, in 1822, that Brazil declared its independence from Portugal’.⁴⁹

Silva Lisboa is then a paradigmatic advocate of Brazil’s Independence, since he believed that ‘stability, continuity and territorial integrity’ were more important than any ‘social disruption’ that might ensue. A rushed independence was in his view unnecessary, since Brazil at this point already had the required economic and political autonomy. His strong criticism of the Cortes was not directed against the structure of the Luso-Brazilian Empire. It was, instead, a response to the changes the Portuguese wanted to implement by eviscerating Brazil’s government and, by doing so, giving the radical minority the opportunity to advance their agenda of Independence.

Thematic and Chronological Division of Chapters

The scope of the work embraces a period of under two years prior to Independence, from Silva Lisboa’s first publication in March 1821 up to the last pamphlet written in August 1822, before the ‘Cry of Ipiranga’. As the prolific writer he was, he managed to publish in this short period of time ten pamphlets and three short-lived periodicals. The monograph is divided into four chapters, the first being dedicated to contextualizing Silva Lisboa’s life and Brazil from late eighteenth century until 1831; the second examines his early support for Portuguese Constitutionalism in 1821 with all the publications until the ‘Dia do Fico’; the third delves into his estrangement from the Cortes of Lisbon, which is symbolized by the publication of the series Reclamação do Brasil, and the fourth discusses the individual pamphlets published in 1822, in which he continues to criticize the decisions taken in Lisbon, but also engage in debates with other journalists regarding the convocation of the Brazilian Assembly.

Silva Lisboa’s first periodical was O Conciliador do Reino Unido, published between March and April 1821. Here, while still supporting the United Kingdom of Brazil, Portugal and the Algarve, he begins to display his dissatisfaction with the measures taken by the Cortes against the autonomy of the Kingdom of Brazil. In the meantime, he also published Diálogo entre Filósofo e Pastor, discussing constitutionalism in a dialogue style, and the series of three issues of Notas ao Despacho Circular do Congresso de Laibach and Despertador Brasiliense, examining, and opposing, the decisions taken by the superpowers of the Holy Alliance (Prussia, Russia and Austria) against constitutional governments during the Congress of Laibach in early 1821. In this same year, he also published the five issues of his second periodical, Sabatina Familiar de Amigos do Bem Comum, in which he intended to develop a pedagogical approach to educating public opinion. With a style closer to that of an essay, it was engulfed by the unfolding of events that was to lead to the crisis between the two Kingdoms of Portugal and Brazil and ended abruptly with a final issue that alludes metaphorically to the crisis. His last publication of 1821 was the pamphlet Despertador Brasiliense, published in December, which adopted a more radical tone against the decisions taken by the Cortes regarding Brazil and was considered to be the most important publication to influence Dom Pedro’s decision to remain in Rio de Janeiro.

In the months before Independence, Silva Lisboa edited another periodical, Reclamação do Brasil, with 15 issues, his most important journalistic publication. Here, there are two topics that concerned Silva Lisboa above all others. The first is the Portuguese upheaval in Bahia led by the officer Inácio Luís Madeira de Melo, who took power in the Province in February 1822. He was concerned that this would be the first step towards a Portuguese recolonization of Brazil and was angered that his brother, a priest, was injured during the attack on the Lapa Convent, which also resulted in the death of the Abbess Joana Angélica. The second topic is the calling of a Brazilian Assembly, which was one of the consequences of this military attack by Portugal and the decisions against Brazilian autonomy on the part of the Cortes of Lisbon. The frustrations with Portuguese constitutionalism in the American Kingdom peaked after the ‘Dia do Fico’ and created the right conditions for those in favour of independence to begin working towards it, something criticized by Silva Lisboa. Although a critic of the Cortes, he was loyal to the Reino Unido with Portugal and suspicious of a Brazilian elite pervaded by petty interests.

In addition to the discussion of the content from Reclamação, I will analyse, to my knowledge for the first time, the fifteenth issue of the series in which Silva Lisboa continues to rebuke the liberal factions for the attacks he suffered from them. As indicated by another discovery presented in this work, that fifteenth issue was probably printed but never published, since two days before its distribution, in a letter addressed to Dom Pedro (31 May 1822), Silva Lisboa asked for a publication he had sent for printing at the ‘Tipografia Nacional’ to be held back. He claimed that he wanted to appease tempers, after the flood of criticism and even threats he had received following the previous issue. To date, no other scholars have related it to the letter to Dom Pedro found in the ‘Arquivo Nacional’.

The fourth chapter discusses the repercussions of Silva Lisboa’s opinions in pamphlets from 1822. The first part presents his strong support for the actions taken by the Brazilian government against the decisions of the Cortes in Portugal in three pamphlets: Heroicidade Brasileira; Glosa a ordem do dia, e manifesto de 14 de Janeiro de 1822, do ex-general das Armas Jorge de Avilez and Agradecimento do Povo ao Salvador da Pátria e o Senhor Príncipe Regente do Reino do Brasil, with the first being censored by the committee of which he was a member. The following three sections present his sorrow and displeasure at being attacked by those who used to esteem him in Defesa da Reclamação do Brasil; the four parts of Memorial Apologético das Reclamações do Brasil and Falsidade do Correio e do Revérbero contra o escritor das Reclamações do Brasil. Finally, in his last pamphlet published before independence from August 1822, Protesto do diretor dos Estudos contra o acordo da Junta Eleitoral da Paróquia de S. José, he presents his